The Repining Sprawl of the roman Empire, or, Cameo to the Ball Game, or, The Whirl With Goliath Goes By

Last October, Steven Millhauser, one of our most distinguished fictioneers (Martin Dressler, &c.) published in The New York Times Book Review a lively essay on the compacted elegance and coiled powers of mystic insight of the outwardly demure short story, contrasting them with the sprawling bureaucracy, imperial hubris and serial adulteries of the novel, still starved amid its post-buffet belching – which reminded me of Babe Ruth crying at the curbside one night, having swung and missed in finding his might at the plate of no use whatever toward his hopes of working his way through the whole of the on-duty staff that night at a Baltimore cathouse.

Millhauser’s first paragraph, in its intimations of the novel’s bumptious Gargantuanism, reminded me not just of the Babe, but of an unforgettable episode of The Andy Griffith Show, in which “Big Jeff” Pruitt*,

*Alan Hale, Jr. , Skipper [Jonas Grumby, pre-shipwreck] on Gilligan’s Island, and the swaggering image of papa Alan, Sr., one of Warner Brothers’ most endearing character actors, often opposite Errol Flynn – The Adventures of Robin Hood, Gentleman Jim, &c.

a husky, moonfaced steamroller of a man in farmer’s overalls, comes from the hills and into Mayberry ‘cos it’s time to git hisself a wahf – which essay in mate-shopping entailed lifting Thelma Lou clean off the ground, Barney be Fifed-and-drummed out of the frame of prior claim. And even more in the way of ravening, work-the-room-into-submission appetites, I thought of course of Mr. Clinton, our recent co-president, whose appetite greatest in oxygen-burning lay not within his proverbial tabloid briefs (and/or boxers), but within his never-sated hopes that the omnibus public adoration for him might soon or late match that on display opposite him in reverse as he shaves mornings, and rehearses that hairline crack in his voice by which he feels your pain no less than mine and that of c. 306 million others as of post time; Millhauser opens his essay:

The short story — how modest in bearing! How unassuming in manner! It sits there quietly, eyes lowered, almost as if trying not to be noticed. And if it should somehow attract your attention, it says quickly, in a brave little self-deprecating voice alive to all the possibilities of disappointment: “I’m not a novel, you know. Not even a short one. If that’s what you’re looking for, you don’t want me.” Rarely has one form so dominated another. And we understand, we nod our heads knowingly: here in America, size is power. The novel is the Wal-Mart, the Incredible Hulk, the jumbo jet of literature. The novel is insatiable — it wants to devour the world. What’s left for the poor short story to do? It can cultivate its garden, practice meditation, water the geraniums in the window box. It can take a course in creative nonfiction. It can do whatever it likes, so long as it doesn’t forget its place — so long as it keeps quiet and stays out of the way. “Hoo ha!” cries the novel. “Here ah come!” The short story is always ducking for cover. The novel buys up the land, cuts down the trees, puts up the condos. The short story scampers across a lawn, squeezes under a fence…

The rest of Millhauser’s essay, sporting with the novel’s forest-felling dreams and unwarranted condescension – including, alas, at the cash register – toward its more distilled and incisive cousin reminded me of the Hungarian-born English novelist Stephen Vizinczey’s maxim, from The Rules of Chaos – that “Power Weakens as it Grows.”